adengappasami: Good to see a video review. I wish you can get rid of all the scores and recommendation and simply do a video review of products on real use.

I vote for the direct opposite of this!

I don't want to watch a 10 minute video review for a product (among myriads) that might not even be worth considering. I'd rather skim a review. See if it's got a good score, and then go back and read the full review if it's of interest.

bgbs: Nikon 1 failure. It's simple, if you cannot sell it in the USA you've failed.

That's not really true anymore. Basically, the market is currently divided in to thirds: Asia, Europe, and the Americas (the smallest market of the big three).

The Americas accounted for 30% of the world camera market for CIPA member companies in 2012. The European market was slightly larger at 33%. Asia (inc. Japan) was also 33% of the market.

By 2020 Asia, without even including Japan, is likely to become the biggest market. Of course, most of that is down to the growth in China.

As someone who's sitting in a hotel in China writing this comment right now, I can tell you that even in the three years I've been coming here, the growth in consumer spending is astonishing.

Of course the US remains a vitally important market. No one would want to walk away from a quarter (I'm guessing the US accounts for 25% on it's own) of the market, but the late 20th century view that if you fail in the US you have failed period, is no longer true and is moving further from the truth ever year.

Najinsky: Well, I'm (genuinely) happy for you guys who can make use of this but unfortunately my X100 is an ornament.

It's an ornament because it developed Sticky Aperture Blades and I can't get it fixed.

I can't get it fixed because Fuji won't publicly acknowledge the problem and insists it goes via warranty repair.

It can't go via warranty repair because the required warranty card and receipt were in a document wallet that got stolen in Thailand (all it had was receipts so the thief got nothing but deprived me of a fix).

They were being carried in the wallet in the vain hope of finding a repair centre while travelling, who spoke enough English to understand the problem in the absence of any public acknowledgement I could show them.

I know some of you get annoyed with me for beating down on Fuji for this, but you know what a great camera it is and I bet you'd feel the same if YOU lost the ability to use yours because of an unacknowledged manufacturing defect and bureaucracy.

Mr grumpy

I have never needed the receipt for repair of my X100. They just did it and sent it back to me. All three times!

Frank Dernie: I have a Leica DMR which works brilliantly on my R8 but results in a heavy camera.

I always thought the digital film idea was wishful thinking. Until all the electronics and battery of a digital SLR can be packaged to fit inside the cylindrical space enclosed by a 135 cassette it will be impossible. Why didn't anybody seem to think of that before throwing away so much money?Blindingly obvious, from an engineering perspective, I would have thought.

Joesph, I actually agree with you that it was impossible in 1999! At that point, we couldn't get everything to fit in the film can in a way that was manufacturable at low cost, in high volume. The FPGA was too big and the Flash memories took up too much space to get enough shots.

However, Actel (supplier of our FPGA) brought forward the development of their smaller BGA package by something like 9 months in order to reduce the footprint of the FPGA. Before that, we were looking to buy bare die and to use chip-on-board. That was technically feasible, but would have been a major pain.

More importantly, the flash memory doubled in capacity from 128Mb to 256Mb, meaning that we could go from 4 parts to just two.

Those two changes were enough to make it possible using 2001 technology.

Frank Dernie: I have a Leica DMR which works brilliantly on my R8 but results in a heavy camera.

I always thought the digital film idea was wishful thinking. Until all the electronics and battery of a digital SLR can be packaged to fit inside the cylindrical space enclosed by a 135 cassette it will be impossible. Why didn't anybody seem to think of that before throwing away so much money?Blindingly obvious, from an engineering perspective, I would have thought.

Joseph, Quest was our biggest creditor. They took over the company by BUYING the assets from the creditor. The debt to them wasn't sufficient to allow them to just take the company as you claim.

The reason they bought the company is because the owner of Quest really believed in the idea. My personal view is he made a series of bad business decisions because he was so blinded by his love of the idea. But that's a different story.

Frank Dernie: I have a Leica DMR which works brilliantly on my R8 but results in a heavy camera.

I always thought the digital film idea was wishful thinking. Until all the electronics and battery of a digital SLR can be packaged to fit inside the cylindrical space enclosed by a 135 cassette it will be impossible. Why didn't anybody seem to think of that before throwing away so much money?Blindingly obvious, from an engineering perspective, I would have thought.

Joseph, we had our own electronics designers and had layout done by a company in San Diego (I forget their name).

We went through several companies before finding one who could build our rigid-flex PCBs correctly. I can't remember who we ended up with.

Our chip packaging was being done in San Diego by an IC packaging company called MeltroniX. We were buying wafers from VVL (and then FillFactory for the next gen 4M sensor).

At our peak we had 31 employees. Most of those were engineers. Matt Whalen was our senior color scientist. He set up ACS after the collapse of SFT.

Our industrial design and plastics were designed by IDE in Scotts Valley. I just looked and you can even find (e)film on their website. Like many of our subcons, including Quest, they came to us via our engineers who had worked on the original Palm Pilot.

Maybe you'll find yourself in the Bay Area some time and we could meet up so I can show you the box full of old electronics.